Relative Positions Within Small Teams of Mobile Units

It is common that a small group of autonomous mobile units requires location information of each other, but it is often not applicable to build infrastructure for location service. Hence, mobile units use RF signals to determine their relative positions within the group. Several techniques have been proposed for localization, but none of them consider both units mobility and anchor unavailability. In this paper we develop a propagation scheme for spreading the signal strength information through the network, and filtering techniques are employed to process the noisy signal. We use Floyd-Warshall algorithm to generate pairwise signal distance of each pair of units. Then Multidimensional Scaling technique is used to generate relative position from pairwise distances. Due to anchor unavailability, relative positions are adjusted by certain rules to reflect the continuous mobility. We verify our methods in MICAz platform. Experimental results show that we can obtain smooth relative positions under mobility and manage moving patterns of mobile units.